


Tracing One Warm Line

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Closure, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kinda gruesome, Loss of Limbs, Possibly Really Gruesome, body parts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 22:49:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5983275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The skin of the frozen hand was unnervingly intact and leathery, shrunken to the bones like an old man's--like Bucky's hands ought to be, if he were properly ninety-seven years old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tracing One Warm Line

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the mcuflashmeme prompt "a story about finding something that has been lost." With many thanks to Feanorinleatherpants and everyone else who did not run screaming when I told them what I wanted Steve and Bucky to find.
> 
> Title is from Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage" because what better title source than a song about searching for someone's hand? Thanks, Due South fandom. I almost named this story "His Hand, the Reaching Out One" before I realized that about five people would have known what I was talking about.

"When I was looking for something when I was a kid, my ma used to say, _Well, where's the last place you saw it?_ "

Steve looked from Bucky to the rocky, frigid river at their feet. The questions he'd been biting back ever since Bucky said _I need you to help me with something_ rose to his lips, but he swallowed them one more time. "Lead the way, then."

Bucky nodded and stood looking down into the rushing black water for a while longer.

Steve tugged on the tether that connected them. It was a bright orange contrast to their cold-water wetsuits. "Nobody's getting lost this time, Buck."

Bucky finally looked up, lips twitching toward a smile. He tugged back on the tether, drawing Steve a step closer, and Steve smiled back, ready for another round of teasing, encouragement, planning.

"Bombs away," Bucky said, and stepped back over the edge.

Steve planted his feet and leaned away, steadying the tether with one hand as it played out. He felt the jerk of Bucky's weight pulling the line taut before he heard a splash. He stared up at the sky, catching his breath and not picturing Bucky falling toward the water. _Again_. Hadn't some philosopher said you couldn't fall into the same river twice?

"What the hell happened to climbing down?!" Steve yelled, when a minute had passed and Bucky hadn't moved or made a sound.

Bucky's voice came back immediately. " _Too slow_!" 

It wasn't too slow for their schedule; they were both prepared to spend a month on this search if that was what it took. Steve wasn't particularly looking forward to spending that much time watching Bucky come to grips with the fact that he was looking for something he would never find, but he would stick with it as long as it took for Bucky to be convinced.

Too slow for Bucky's nerves, though... When Steve let his gaze drop from the cloudy sky, he faced a sheer cliff. There was still a railroad track up there. Neither he nor Bucky had even suggested reaching the site by that route, even when they made jokes about zip lines.

"See anything that looks familiar?" Steve asked, still bracing the line and keeping back from the edge.

Steve finally felt motion at the end of the line as Bucky looked around down there. "Give me a little more slack, I need to get lower. I was in the water."

Steve bit his lip but touched the winch at his end of the tether, letting a little more play out through his hand. He didn't hear a sound as Bucky entered the water, just the continued rushing of the main current and a metal-on-stone tapping. Bucky was testing his fingers against the rocks down there. He could use them as pitons if he had to. He wouldn't be swept away.

"Can you go a couple of steps downstream? I think it's shifted."

Steve didn't argue with Bucky about the likelihood of this being the exact right spot, or the rocks being the way he remembered them. He braced his hands on the tether and took a couple of steps downstream, and Bucky's weight shifted with him at the other end of the tether. There was a definite splash down below now, and a grinding sound of metal on stone, or stone on stone. The surface Steve was standing on shifted slightly. 

Steve steadied his feet and finally looked down, but he couldn't see anything from here. "Buck?"

"I think it's--I think this is the spot, I just--can you see, is there ice up there? Can we shift this rock back?"

Steve knelt, carefully adjusting the tether as he did to keep Bucky in the same position. He brushed at the snow beside him, looking for a seam separating the piece of rock he stood on from another. He didn't let himself think about what it meant.

"Should I try to break it?"

"Let me..." the tether tugged as Bucky changed position below him. Another grinding sound, metal on stone, and the rock Steve stood on vibrated slightly. "Try now!"

Steve shifted position again, adjusting the tether as he moved to firmer ground, and then he unslung his shield and took a deep breath. He hit the ice three times before it cracked--that seemed right--but nothing happened for a long moment after that. 

"Buck?" 

"Go again," Bucky said, sounding hoarse, breathless. His weight wasn't pulling against the tether now; he was wedged against the rocks somehow, holding himself up. 

Steve braced his feet, checked his end of the tether, and then shoved the edge of his shield into the crack in the ice and pushed. There was a crack like bone breaking, and Steve jerked the shield clear, grabbing the tether.

He saw it for just a second, right where it had been for seventy years. A blue sleeve and a hand upraised, the fingers curled in, frozen and nearly as gray as the stone. Then Bucky's weight jerked against the tether and a boulder twice the size of a refrigerator slid away in a cloud of snow and crashing water. Steve backed away from the edge at double time, hauling Bucky up after him.

Bucky used his left hand to pull himself over the edge. He stopped as soon as he was on solid ground, on his knees and curling down over himself like he had a gut wound. Steve closed the distance, putting a hand on his back; it was only when he knelt with his face next to Bucky's that he understood.

Bucky had caught it. He was cradling his own severed left arm against his chest like he was protecting a newborn child. Steve's mouth and eyes watered, but he kept his hand on Bucky's back and made himself look at it.

The skin of the frozen hand was unnervingly intact and leathery, shrunken to the bones like an old man's--like Bucky's hands ought to be, if he were properly ninety-seven years old. The blue sleeve was black in places, but parts of it were a brilliant unweathered blue, exactly the color Steve remembered. The arm had been trapped between stones, frozen but otherwise protected from the elements. That was to say nothing of whatever the serum did for the preservation of tissue; he had been frozen in much the same conditions himself, for nearly as long.

Steve closed his eyes and pictured how it had come to be there. Bucky landing in the river after that fall, dashed against the rocks and then caught there. His arm was pinned--

"I couldn't feel it," Bucky said quietly. Steve tried to tighten his grip, but the slick, impervious surface of his wetsuit wouldn't give. He moved his hand to the back of Bucky's neck, and Bucky pushed up into the touch, straightening a little and flicking a glance out to meet Steve's eyes through the wet strands of his hair.

"When it--I couldn't feel it. I wasn't really conscious, exactly, after I hit the river. Just flashes. And the cold, the shock. I couldn't feel anything. I couldn't feel my arm. I could just--I could see it. Against the stone. I don't know how long, just. I saw it. And then--I wasn't against the stones anymore, and I couldn't see it anymore."

Steve swallowed spit and bile, blinked his eyes clear. He carefully did not think of Bucky's shattered arm breaking completely, the river sweeping him away from it to everything that came after. "Last place you saw it."

Bucky hazarded a shaky smile, his teeth as white as dry old bone, like the jagged end that protruded from the blue sleeve's upper end. "Ma was right after all."

Steve tried to smile back, but the best he could do was to say, "You're freezing, Buck. Come on, let's get away from the edge."

Bucky huffed and muttered, "That's my line," but he let Steve tug him up and walked with him to where they'd dropped their packs. Steve got his bedroll and tossed the groundcloth down. "Sit."

Bucky sat, and Steve sat down beside him and unzipped his sleeping bag before wrapping it around them both. Bucky caught the edge on his side with his left hand--his metal left hand. His other left hand stayed curled against his chest, and Steve realized that Bucky had changed his grip on it. He'd taken the glove off his right hand, and his bare fingers were tracing over that leathery flesh. His own two hands, touching each other. One dead, one alive.

Steve looked away, staring into the snow and trying not to be actually sick. It was a sensation he hadn't felt this strongly in a long time.

"Do you ever..." Bucky trailed off, then shook his head sharply, and Steve had to look at him again.

He didn't go on, and Steve couldn't leave it there. He'd come this far. He'd known what they were looking for. He just hadn't realized that success would be so much more horrific than failure.

"Do I ever...?"

Bucky shook his head. "It's not the same. I just--sometimes I forget, I--" Bucky's new left hand flexed on the edge of the sleeping bag, and his right hand flexed around his old left hand. "I wasn't awake much before they gave me the arm. The river, the rocks--it could've been a nightmare, almost. Sometimes I forget that it's not my arm. I forget that I lost something."

Steve looked away, and realized what Bucky had been about to ask him. He nodded.

"Yeah, I do," Steve said quietly. "I--not for long, usually. But, yeah. Sometimes I forget that this isn't my body."

_Sometimes I forget that I lost something_. He didn't say it. He couldn't, not while he was sitting next to Bucky and the horribly tangible evidence of what Bucky had lost. What was his sick, small, real self to that?

"What--" the question died in his throat. He'd been thinking it for days now, always with a flippantly hypothetical edge. _What would you do with it if you found it?_

Bucky looked toward him, and Steve looked toward Bucky's pack, which Bucky had packed alone. He could have anything in there. A box, for example, just about the length of his arm.

"Are you going to--bring it home?"

As he said it, Steve had a horrible vision of Bucky having the metal arm removed, reattaching that shrunken fraction of a corpse to his shoulder. With the serum, hell, it might even work. 

"Well, it's something to put in that grave with my name on it next to my parents," Bucky said, almost idly, and that dispelled the nightmare enough for Steve to look over at him.

He was looking down at his arm again, turning it toward the weak sunlight. It should have looked like a Halloween prop, but it had all the undeniable reality of a corpse. _Bucky's_ corpse. _James Buchanan Barnes, 1917-1945,_ like the gravestone said.

"But I think it's been buried long enough," Bucky said quietly. "Trapped, and cold, and... I don't want to be cold anymore."

His metal hand flexed again. "Could you--there's a box in my pack. Looks like an ammo can."

Steve nodded and stood, realizing as he did that Bucky had asked him to do it because the alternative was asking Steve to hold his arm while _he_ fetched the box. 

It was right at the top of Bucky's pack, a green metal rectangle. Steve pulled it out--it was, as he'd imagined, exactly arm's length--and set it in the snow at Bucky's feet. Bucky tipped forward onto his knees and opened it, revealing--almost nothing. An oblong box, silvery on the inside and empty except for a little gray block of something that looked like plastic explosive.

"Buck," Steve said. He could understand the impulse to give the arm a big loud sendoff, but it would make a hell of a mess. "Is that--"

Bucky shook his head. "Special accelerant. Stark put it together for me, along with this." 

Bucky rapped his metal knuckles against the inside of the hinged lid. "Adamantium. Won't deform at 1400 Celsius. Takes care of the problem of leaving a tissue sample lying around for people to find, too."

It was a tiny portable crematorium. Steve looked closer, and found the fine mesh of airholes at both ends, to feed oxygen to the superheated fire. "Ah."

"Won't take long," Bucky added. He was still holding his arm to his chest, making no move to lay it down. "It's small, dried out. It'll go up quick."

"Yeah," Steve said softly. "You won't have time to feel a thing, right?"

Bucky's mouth curved up in a tense, reflexive smile, and he nodded sharply. Steve sat down beside him again, pressing his left shoulder to Bucky's right. "Hey. Let me help?"

Bucky closed his eyes and nodded more smoothly this time. Steve slid his hands in past the protective curl of Bucky's right arm and touched it for the first time. 

It was light and small, dry and cold, and it was a piece of Bucky he'd never thought he would see or touch again. Steve touched the back of his hand, just above the end of his sleeve, where he had touched a thousand times. It felt nothing like Bucky, and he had to hold his breath to keep from sobbing. 

Bucky's eyes flashed open--he'd heard something, felt something. Steve didn't bother to try to control his expression. He just tightened his grip on Bucky's dead arm and eased it away from his chest, bringing it down to the burning box. Bucky's hands--both of them, metal and flesh--trailed after, hovering over Steve's hands as he laid Bucky's arm down in its final resting place.

Steve drew his hands back and realized he'd laid it palm up. Three of Bucky's fingernails were still attached, and there was dirt in the crease of his palm. A whole new rush of recognition crashed over him at the sight of _Bucky's hand_ in that cold metal box. He sobbed out loud, almost gagging on the force of it, and clapped his own hands over his mouth like Bucky might have somehow not heard it.

The sound seemed to break Bucky from his own paralysis. He moved quickly, breaking up the block of accelerant and scattering it down the length of the arm. He leaned across the box to grab his pack, and fished out a little length of fuse cord and a lighter. He fed the fuse in through an airhole as he said, "Stevie, you oughta back away about ten feet, okay?"

Steve didn't argue. He got to his feet and grabbed both of their packs, moving with them back toward the river. Bucky knelt motionless for another second, and then he slammed the lid shut and flicked the lighter, touching it to the fuse. 

He stood up quickly then, and he was at Steve's side several seconds before the tiny flickering flame traveled up the fuse and into the box. Nothing happened for just long enough to seem like nothing was going to happen, and then there was a soft _whomp_ of air being drawn into a fire and a sudden, shocking burst of heat from the little box. 

Bucky let out a long breath and put his left hand out--gauging the heat with it, or shielding himself like he was holding one hand up to block the sun from his eyes. He flexed his fingers, not quite waving goodbye, and Steve thought that maybe he was just reminding himself that it was still attached. 

Steve reached out to close his hand around Bucky's metal wrist, and was surprised to find it already warm from the radiant heat. He tugged it back and pulled Bucky with him, back to the cooler air right at the edge of the river. Bucky didn't shake off his grip, but flexed his metal fingers, looking down at them. 

"That's what got me thinking about it," Bucky said, bringing his left hand up, Steve's still curled around his wrist. He touched his lips, and then Steve's cheek, a startling warmth in the cold air. "Stark asked me if I had any problems with the arm--anything I wanted to change about it. I said I didn't like it being cold all the time, and so conspicuous. He said he could fix that, make it look just like the old one, and I thought..."

Bucky looked back toward the box and didn't finish saying it, but Steve thought he understood. Bucky had had to remember first, once and for all, that there was something he had lost; he had had to pay his respects and lay it to rest. And you couldn't have a funeral without another mourner.

Steve tugged him close, looping an arm around his shoulders, and Bucky leaned into the half-hug. 

Steve snorted after a while, and Bucky met his eyes, silently questioning.

"You know what _my_ ma used to say when I was looking for something?" 

Bucky frowned, his eyes going distant like he was actually trying to remember what Sarah Rogers had said. He shook his head after a second, focusing again on Steve.

Steve touched Bucky's metal wrist and looked over toward the innocuous metal box full of exotic accelerant, just another miracle of engineering casually dispensed by Tony. 

"She said, _St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come 'round, something's lost that must be found._ "

Bucky held his gaze for a moment. Steve saw him get the joke slowly, like an avalanche starting; first the snow sliding silently for a moment and then the furious collapse. 

"Saint," Bucky got out in a choked voice. "Tony, Patron of--"

Bucky pressed his face into Steve's shoulder and laughed until Steve was shaken into joining him. They stood at the edge of the river where Bucky had died and howled with laughter, warm on one side and cold on the other. They each held on to the other with both hands.


End file.
